Mario La Giglia admits he and his colleagues were a little too relaxed entering Iraq for the first time during the spring of 2003.

Three weeks after the United States first attacked Baghdad, the Blanding-born man and his platoon drove out of Kuwait in a convoy of Humvees and 5-ton trucks into the relative calm of southern Iraq. The guys were sitting around, talking, making their way down the bumpy road.

"We had the perception that things were going to be OK, that we were going to be safe, that we'd missed the big battle," he said.

But six hours into their travels — about halfway to Baghdad — the convoy was pounded in an attack.

The event served as a wake-up call to La Giglia, who joined the Army National Guard at 17 while still a junior at Monticello High School in San Juan County. "When you start seeing RPGs flying, you realize this is real," said La Giglia, now 28. "This is not just on TV anymore."

None of the 20 men La Giglia supervised in his platoon were hurt. A rocket-propelled grenade hit a vehicle nearby and did not detonate. "It just stuck in the side," he said.

Thankfully, that incident served as a lucky theme for his tour. "I had a year's worth of those kind of blessings," La Giglia said.

The young man served with the 1457th engineering unit of the Utah National Guard. Everyone came home. In fact, he can't think of a single soldier lost out of several hundred in his battalion.

"Time after time, guys shouldn't have come back, but they did," he said.

Once a group of guys was taking an armored Humvee out on one of its maiden patrols. They'd just got the vehicle, which had replaced one of the less-protective "light-skinned" Humvees.

"They didn't get a mile outside of the gate before they took a direct hit by an IED," he said.

The improvised explosive device detonated, blew off the Humvee roof and tore the hood away. "Some guys had broken eardrums, some had bloody noses, but no one was killed," La Giglia said. "There were even a bunch of ammo inside the vehicle that caught fire and started throwing off rounds inside the Humvee. No one got hit."

His love for the service goes back to when he was a teenager. "I always wanted to be a soldier," he said. La Giglia joined the Utah National Guard at 17. "I knew I couldn't afford college, and the Army was a good way to help me out with that."